Page 115 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

Jessa’s head turns between us. “Marcus, who’s he talking about?”

I keep my eyes on Voss, who flinches under them. “I haven’t touched your sister.”

“You had her fired.” The words spill out of him. “Her firm let her go this afternoon. She worked years to get that job. Don’t do this to her.” His hand tightens on the folder. “You haven’t even spared my family. We’ve been friends for years. How can you pull your money out of my parents’ company?!”

I just stare at him dispassionately, and he continues, his voice desperate. “That company was their life’s blood and sweat. They’ll be ruined inside a month. You can’t do this!”

I walk behind my desk and lower myself into the chair. “Why not?”

His mouth opens. Nothing comes.

“Your sister decided it was fine to let herself into my house and put her hands on my woman, the mother of my child.” I lace my fingers on the blotter. “Give me one reason I shouldn’t bury your whole family for it.”

“Sloane’s foolish.” His voice breaks. “She always has been. She didn’t think—”

“I’d have believed that ten years ago.” I lean back. “She’s thirty now, Voss, clever and cruel under all that gloss.” A pen sits by my hand, and I turn it once. “I have tolerated her for years out of respect for our friendship. She laid hands on my daughter, on my woman.” The pen goes still. “That’s where my patience runs out.”

“She’s in love with you.” He looks at me pleadingly. “She has been for years, and you never once gave her a chance.”

“It isn’t my job to give her one.” I hold his stare. “If she’s got feelings for me, that’s yours to manage. You’re the one who kept dragging her wherever I was.”

He looks at Jessa, then his gaze skitters away.

My voice drops low. “Take a good, long look at her. That’s the woman who was carrying my child when you and your people threw her out.”

He looks down. “I was trying to spare you. You had your career, your whole future ahead of you.”

“You of all people know how it works.” I push up out of the chair. “A shifter child stays with the pack. I always meant to come home to take the seat, and you knew that.” I round the desk. “So tell me the real reason you sent her away. Then tell me why I’ve got a hole in my memory where that whole night should be. Because I don’t buy that you knew nothing about that night, not with the precision with which you managed me back then.”

Voss goes white. “I had a few friends ask around the bars I used back then,” I go on. “They came back with a story. People remember me walking out with a woman helping me, looking drunk.” I watch the color drain from his face. “They remember her slipping something into my drink.”

“I had no idea she’d do it.” Voss can’t meet my gaze.

My eyes stay on Voss as I close the space between us. “What did your sister do to me that night?”

He won’t answer, so I take him by the jaw and force his face up to mine. “I’ll spare your family,” I tell him low. “Sloane I won’t. Give me the truth this second, and I’ll stop tearing your family’s money apart.”

He’s gone bloodless. “She’s my sister.”

“You can’t shield her anymore.” My grip firms. “Keep trying, and I’ll ruin Sloane and everything your family owns. I’m not in the alpha’s chair. I don’t need to be. When I choose to move against a man, you know how vicious I can be. No one, including my uncle, can stop me.”

Voss’s shoulders cave as the fight goes out of him.

“She got hold of something,” he says. “I don’t know what. I took it off her that night, and it made me sick for days after. It smelled sweet, sickly sweet, enough to turn my stomach.”

I go still. “What scent?”

“It was sweet and cloying.” He swallows hard. “I don’t know where she got it. She swore all she wanted was to sleep with you.”

The floor tilts under me. “What else did she tell you?”

“That she slipped it into your drink. You went groggy.” His hands tremble. “She was going to take you to a hotel. She wanted—” He stops himself. “She wanted to get pregnant, to trap you into marriage. She went for the car herself, and you’d wandered off by the time she got back. She panicked. That’s when she told me.”

“What kind of drug puts an alpha-born on the floor?” I already know, but I want him to say it.

He fidgets with his hands.

“It was wolfsbane.” My voice has dropped, quiet and cold. “She got her hands on wolfsbane.”